Ridgebury minister to talk about history and religion

By Robert Miller, Staff Writer

Published
8:45 pm EDT, Friday, October 23, 2009

The Reverand John Heeckt, pastor of Ridgebury Congregational Church, will be giving a lecture about the early years of religion in Ridgefield. Heeckt is pictured here on Thursday Oct. 15, 2009 in the Ridgebury Congregational churches office. less

The Reverand John Heeckt, pastor of Ridgebury Congregational Church, will be giving a lecture about the early years of religion in Ridgefield. Heeckt is pictured here on Thursday Oct. 15, 2009 in the Ridgebury ... more

The Reverand John Heeckt, pastor of Ridgebury Congregational Church, will be giving a lecture about the early years of religion in Ridgefield. Heeckt is pictured here on Thursday Oct. 15, 2009 in the Ridgebury Congregational churches office. less

The Reverand John Heeckt, pastor of Ridgebury Congregational Church, will be giving a lecture about the early years of religion in Ridgefield. Heeckt is pictured here on Thursday Oct. 15, 2009 in the Ridgebury ... more

RIDGEFIELD -- In the years before their Revolutionary War, the religious establishment in Connecticut consisted of the Congregational Church and the Anglican Church and not a whole lot more.

But after the American victory at Yorktown in 1781, liberation was in the air. A decade later, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed "that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.''

"It was the first time ever that a government didn't try to create an established religion,'' said the Rev. John Heeckt, pastor of Ridgebury Congregational Church. "What the government said was do whatever you want, as long as you don't make trouble for anybody else.

Heeckt -- a trained historian as a well as an ordained minister -- will talk about those decades of religious liberation and how, remarkably, the established religions managed to survive them, in a two-part lecture sponsored by the Ridgefield Historical Society.

The first part will be Wednesday and the second, Nov. 4. Both will take place in St. Stephen's Episcopal Church at 7:30 p.m.

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"What Happens When No One Is In Charge -- Religion in 18th Century America'' will be the third and fourth talks in a annual series Heeckt has given on the subject of religion in Ridgefield and the rest of the country in the 18th and 19th century.

The lectures, said town historian Kay Ables, are a good chance for people to learn about the place where religion and history meet.

"I think lot of the people who attend understand it, but want to learn more,'' she said.

Heeckt said the town's Congregational and Anglican churches were established before the Revolutionary War. But the Anglicans -- being part of the Church of England -- had a tougher time managing to survive. Their Ridgefield church was used to store gunpowder when its Loyalist pastor left town.

Ables said the Rev. Epenetus Townsend became a chaplain to the British troops in New York City and met a hard, albeit Loyal, end. Townsend, his wife and five children died in Boston Bay in 1779, when the ship they were on -- bound for Nova Scotia -- sank.

"It was a tremendously difficult thing for an Anglican minister to support the war,'' Heeckt said.

Those who did managed by basically using Thomas Jefferson's lines of argument in the Declaration of Independence, when he said it was the King of England who broke faith with the American colonies, not the other way around.

"That way they could say, `Rebellion? What rebellion? It's all the king's fault,''' Heeckt said.

But after the Revolution, there was a revolution in theology in America, with new sects springing up continually.

The Methodists, who barely existed in the American colonies before the war, became one of the strongest Protestant denominations.

That was due largely to the charismatic leadership of Francis Asbury and the dedication of missionaries like Jesse Lee, "the apostle of New England Methodism.'' The town's Methodist church bears Lee's name.

"Jesse Lee actually lived in Ridgefield in the late 1700s,'' Heeckt said.

At the same time, the Restorationists -- the forerunners of today's Evangelicals -- began to flourish by preaching a return to the roots of the church in first century Christianity, he said.

With all these challenges, the mainstream churches had to respond or be bowled over. The Congregationalists, led by men like Horace Bushnell, urged that their church adapt to and become engaged with everyday society.